Crowdsourcing Technologies Research Articles

Seismic Fragility Assessment of Inner Peripheries of Italy through Digital Crowd-Sourcing Technologies

The structural and seismic fragility assessment of minor historical centers of the Inner Peripheries of Italy is a key phase of the preservation process of the historical and cultural features of a portion of the Italian building stock, whose reuse is crucial for the reversal of shrinking trends and the stimulation of population growth. In this framework, the opportunities offered by digital crowd-sourcing technologies with respect to performing probabilistic structural safety assessment at a large scale are investigated herein. The objective of this research was to exploit data and information available on the web such that the key building features of an area of interest are collected through virtual inspections, historical databases, maps, urban plans, etc. Thus, homogeneous clusters of buildings identified in the area of interest are catalogued and associated with specific building classes (chosen among those available in the literature), and the buildings’ levels of seismic fragility are determined through the development of fragility curves. The research outcomes show that the proposed approach provides a satisfactory initial screening of the seismic fragility level of an area, thus allowing for the identification of priority zones that require further investigations or structural interventions to mitigate seismic risk.

Crowdsourcing Technologies to Promote Citizens’ Participation in Smart Cities, a Scoping Review

The scoping review reported by this article aimed to identify (i) the purposes of the studies using crowdsourcing technologies in the context of the smart cities’ implementations, (ii) the characteristics of the crowdsourcing technologies being used, and (iii) the maturity level of the solutions being proposed. An electronic search was conducted, and 29 studies were included in the review after the selection process. The results show a current interest in crowdsourcing campaigns using participatory reporting and participatory sensing to (i) support urban infrastructures’ maintenance, (ii) facilitate urban mobility, (iii) monitor the environment, (iv) manage crowds, (v) aggregate geographical information, and (vi) collect citizens’ perspectives about the cities. However, the results also show low maturity level of the proposed solutions and lack of consolidated evidence about their effectiveness, which difficulties their dissemination.

High-Resolution Flood Simulation in Urban Areas Through the Application of Remote Sensing and Crowdsourcing Technologies

High-resolution flood simulation considering the influence of high buildings and fundamental facilities is important for flood risk assessment in urban areas. However, it is also a challenging task due to the difficulties in acquiring detailed topography and monitoring data for model construction and validation. In this study, a high-resolution flood simulation with a grid size of 0.5 m is realized through the use of detailed topography obtained by an unmanned aerial vehicle and real-time flood information acquired from social media. To discover the influence of terrain resolution on flood simulations, the high-resolution simulation results are compared with those with coarser grid resolutions (5, 10, and 20 m) for a flash flood event in Taiwan. In the case with higher grid resolution, the simulation results are in better agreement with the photos from social media in terms of flood extent, depth, and occurrence time. The flood simulation with coarse resolution (>5 m) tends to overestimate the flood duration on roads and provide bias information to decision-makers in the assessment of traffic impact and economic loss.

КРАУДСОРСИНГ КАК ЭЛЕМЕНТ ИНТЕРАКТИВНОГО ОБУЧЕНИЯ МАТЕМАТИКЕ НА ГУМАНИТАРНЫХ НАПРАВЛЕНИЯХ ПОДГОТОВКИ

The article reveals the key aspects of interactive teaching of mathematics in the humanities areas of training. The theoretical and methodological basis of interactive teaching of mathematics is highlighted. Interactive learning acts as a means of organizing a special space of interaction of subjects of educational activity for the construction of developing teaching of mathematics. One of the effective methods of interactive learning is crowdsourcing technology. Crowdsourcing technology is a project to solve a social and significant problem on a charitable basis, in which everyone can participate and offer a variety of solutions through network technologies. The article suggests the stages of working on a crowdsourcing project. An example of the project “Organization of an accessible environment for students with disabilities” for students in the areas of training “State and municipal direction”, “Social work” in the framework of studying the section “Analytical geometry” of the discipline “Mathematics” is presented. Special attention is paid to the mathematical component of the project on the organization of a barrier-free environment for students with disabilities (justification of the project work; drawing project; mathematical calculation using knowledge of analytical geometry; economic justification of the project). The article presents students’ projects containing geometric constructions, mathematical calculations and analysis of the calculations obtained. The conducted reflection and self-assessment showed a high level of interest in the work carried out, highlighted the importance of mathematical knowledge for solving professional problems and increased the level of involvement in the study of mathematics in non-core areas of training. Networking and interaction are a key feature of crowdsourcing technologies. Crowdsourcing allows one to organically integrate mathematical tools into a professional context.

The theory of analysis of sharing economy instruments

Subject. The article considers the applied tools of the shared economy, like crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowdworking, crowdlanding, crowdtesting, crowdmarketing, and other economic technologies and mechanisms, based on active participation of a large number of consumers. However, there are still no studies on the systematization of theoretical approaches to investigate these tools. Objectives. We focus on developing the scientific principles and ideas that summarize practical experience and show patterns of applying the sharing economy tools. Methods. We analyzed the features of the sharing economy. This enabled to determine the multidirectionality of this phenomenon. The articles with the keywords “sharing economy” presented in the global scientific citation database Web of Science Core Collection for 2015–2021 were grouped into sections, describing the complication of connections between the elements of the sharing economy. Results. We developed scientific principles of accessibility, digital connectivity, customer focus, efficiency, and optimality of using the tools of the sharing economy. The implementation of the developed scientific principles is illustrated by real examples. We suggest scientific ideas of network potential, digital potential, the adapted McKinsey matrix, matrices of project performance, matrices of the balance of production and transaction costs for analyzing the application of sharing economy tools. Conclusions. The theoretical significance of obtained results is in the systematization of principles and ideas of the analysis of sharing economy tools. The practical significance is in the formation of applied tools for the economic analysis of the development of collaborative consumption of products and services in a digital society.

Применение профессиональной краудсорсинговой платформы для решения HR-задач

Crowdsourcing technologies may solve a wide range of business issues: improve efficiency of HR management, increase customer loyalty and maximize economic efficiency of whole enterprise. The recent years best practice has shown how crowdsourcing is gaining particular relevance of human resource management, allowing HR managers to resolve organization relevant problems in quick and cost-effective manner. Important advantage of crowdsourcing сomes from his main ability: decomposition of tasks into small parts and the ability to perform it’s remotely, via Internet. Thanks to this, not only large corporations, but also small and medium-sized businesses can execute a large-scale projects in a short time. This article discusses the main approaches and principles of practical project management via crowdsourcing platforms, using as the example “Beorg Smart Vision” solution.

Open-source architecture and questions of intellectual property, tacit knowledge, and liability

Inspired by open-source and crowd sourcing technologies, the concept of ‘open-source architecture’ has been increasingly used to describe collaborative architectural design (CoDesign) in recent years. In this article, we aim to show that major related issues remain unresolved. As such, they limit the wider adaptation of open-source methods to the world of architecture. We focus on the following issues: first, architectural theorists have not addressed the meaningful limitations and possibilities of these methods in architecture, including the ramifications of sharing knowledge with end users; second, professional architects already share ideas through existing networks that resemble open-source models; third, projects that have aspired to democratise design processes in the recent past have encountered difficulties in sharing tacit professional knowledge with non-professional users; finally, existing open-source licences exclude professional liability which is the bedrock of relations between the architect, their clients, and regulatory authorities in architecture. To arrive at open-source architecture, we argue that these issues need to be further investigated and resolved. The article concludes with reflections on the exchange of knowledge and ideas between professionals and non-professionals, architects and users, and how this can be simplified by using crowd-sourcing technologies.

Electronic legislative initiative as a Tool to improve Citizens’ Public activity in Cyberspace: Common issues in the BriCs Countries, europe and the russian Federation

Around the world, parliaments, governments, civil society organizations and even individual parliamentarians are taking measures to make the legislative process more participatory. A key instrument of such measures is e-democracy. In the 1980s, a number of pilot projects on electronic voting and online discussions were introduced. However, only since 2000, with the active development of the Internet, has considerable interest in utilizing electronic initiatives to advance democracy emerge. Today, researchers warn that despite all the talk about “e-democracy,” the circle of actual decision makers is likely to remain as small as it has been heretofore. In this article, the author analyzes the pros and cons of electronic initiatives in the BRICS countries, Europe and the Russian Federation, and provides practical information for improvement. The author suggests that the next step needed to improve civil activity in filing legislative initiatives is the application of a regular mechanism to establish the possibility of organizing the process of civil legislative initiative nomination and the collection of signatures in electronic form, in particular via the Internet, with the possible use of crowd sourcing technologies.

The role of translation technologies in Spanish language learning

ABSTRACTTranslation for language learning has reemerged during recent years as an additional asset for foreign language instruction. In this time, the professional practice and training of translation has moved to a technological paradigm in which virtually all translation activities are computer mediated and this complex activity is conceptualized as human–computer interaction. Translation is therefore now inseparable from the physical computer, translation technologies, tools and resources found online and the interconnectedness provided by the Internet. This article reviews these technologies in the context of Spanish language learning. For these purposes, three main areas of interest are discussed and placed in the context of language learning. First of all, the role of machine translation (MT) both as an assistance in reading and writing tasks and from the perspective of post-editing for language learning is examined. The second area of interest is the use of translational corpora in the foreign language classroom. The article will finish with a review of the increasingly popular language-related crowdsourcing technologies that are expanding translation tasks to language learners around the world using specialized micro-task workflows.

Investtech and Crowdsourcing Best Ideas: Investment Strategies for a Low-Yield Environment

Asset owners have to deal with the challenge of a potentially low-yielding investment environment for the foreseeable future. The traditional approach to raise the expected return typically leads to increasing allocations to illiquid assets such as private equity, real estate, or infrastructure. However, that method is not suitable to all asset owners. This paper provides a different and complementary approach: leveraging an asset owner’s unique position as a gateway to best ideas and non-traditional, diverse data sets. It demonstrates how assets owners, especially one located close to Silicon Valley, can utilize two key innovations to improve governance, risk management, and potentially expected returns: Crowdsourcing and Investment Technologies (InvestTech). Specifically, the paper shows how asset owners can leverage the best ideas and data sets of their partners (asset managers, banks, custodians, and research firms), and then convert these best ideas into implementable investment decisions. In this specific application, we examine how a limited form of “crowdsourcing” and InvestTech allowed the Office of the Chief Investment Officer of the Regents of the University of California (UC Investments) to develop its own internal investment model to manage asset allocations. In doing so, the portfolio and risks are better managed by the investment team. This approach is easily replicable by other asset owners, and each fund can develop its own bespoke approach based on relationships with vendors and key risks and objectives.

Studying the Effects of Task Notification Policies on Participation and Outcomes in On-the-go Crowdsourcing

Recent years have seen the growth of physical crowdsourcing systems (e.g., Uber; TaskRabbit) that motivate large numbers of people to provide new and improved physical tasking and delivery services on-demand. In these systems, opportunistically relying on people to make convenient contributions may lead to incomplete solutions, while directing people to do inconvenient tasks requires high incentives. To increase people's willingness to participate and reduce the need to incentivize participation, we study on-the-go crowdsourcing as an alternative approach that suggests tasks along people’s existing routes that are conveniently on their way. We explore as a first step in this paper the design of task notification policies that decide when, where, and to whom to suggest tasks. Situating our work in the context of practical problems such as package delivery and lost-and-found searches, we conducted controlled experiments that show how small changes in task notification policy can influence individual participation and actions in significant ways that in turn affect system outcomes. We discuss the implications of our findings on the design of future on-the-go crowdsourcing technologies and applications.

Spatial patterns and environmental constraints on ecosystem services at a catchment scale

Improved understanding and prediction of the fundamental environmental controls on ecosystem service supply across the landscape will help to inform decisions made by policy makers and land-water managers. To evaluate this issue for a local catchment case study, we explored metrics and spatial patterns of service supply for water quality regulation, agriculture production, carbon storage, and biodiversity for the Macronutrient Conwy catchment. Methods included using ecosystem models such as LUCI and JULES, integration of national scale field survey datasets, earth observation products and plant trait databases, to produce finely resolved maps of species richness and primary production. Analyses were done with both 1×1km gridded and subcatchment data. A common single gradient characterised catchment scale ecosystem services supply with agricultural production and carbon storage at opposing ends of the gradient as reported for a national-scale assessment. Species diversity was positively related to production due to the below national average productivity levels in the Conwy combined with the unimodal relationship between biodiversity and productivity at the national scale. In contrast to the national scale assessment, a strong reduction in water quality as production increased was observed in these low productive systems. Various soil variables were tested for their predictive power of ecosystem service supply. Soil carbon, nitrogen, their ratio and soil pH all had double the power of rainfall and altitude, each explaining around 45% of variation but soil pH is proposed as a potential metric for ecosystem service supply potential as it is a simple and practical metric which can be carried out in the field with crowd-sourcing technologies now available. The study emphasises the importance of considering multiple ecosystem services together due to the complexity of covariation at local and national scales, and the benefits of exploiting a wide range of metrics for each service to enhance data robustness.

Geography of Solidarity: Spatial and Temporal Patterns

Crowdsourcing technologies represent a paradigm shift in the way certain tasks are performed. Linux, Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap represent massive achievements that are changing our access to open software technology, knowledge and geoservices. These changes have also reached humanitarian response in front of man-made or natural disasters: digital humanitarians (DH) are given the chance to remotely help out those in urgent need, by accomplishing thousands of microtasks that augment the information about the disaster for those who work on the ground. However, the organisers and designers of these complex technological platforms need also to consider how to achieve larger, better, faster humanitarian reaction; as well as how to build, expand and maintain a volunteer community. This paper studies the temporal and geographical patterns of past online humanitarian response, and attempts to find clues that optimize the potentialities of a DH platform.Our findings suggest that the volunteers are strongly committed to the tasks: their contributions are submitted at a very fast pace, and they contribute repeatedly over time; also, such contribution is heavily driven by mass media coverage of the disaster: an increase in the media coverage is closely followed by an increase in the volunteers response. On the geographic side, there are large asymmetries regarding the origin of contributions, with a clear skew towards English-speaking areas.All these analysis outcomes inform us about human activity temporal and temporal patterns in very specific, unexplored context –time-constrained task accomplishing; additionally, such outcomes should rigorously inform future humanitarian technologies, and associated activities.

Crowdsourcing Public Opinion Using Urban Pervasive Technologies: Lessons From Real‐Life Experiments in Oulu

The civic potential of pervasive computing technologies has been increasingly explored within academic and urban planning communities. One vision is of communities and cities enriched with pervasive computing, where citizens can leverage the new technology and interfaces for their own purposes, and at the same time be empowered to be heard through the use of such technology. This article reports lessons learned from a project that created public human interfaces for interacting with city officials in Oulu, Finland. We focus on civic engagement and reflect on a deployment of public interactive crowdsourcing technologies that are openly available to everyone, right in the heart of the city. The series of field trials reported here involve public displays, mobile phones, and Internet technologies. We find differences in the performance of different kinds of input mechanisms, and present lessons learned from cooperating with officials in a joint civic engagement effort.

Crowdsourcing in Public Policy: Technologies, Subjects and Its Socio-Political Role

The article describes the potential of the new interactive crowdsourcing technologies in the public policy. Theconceptual basis of the research implies the network theory of policy, the theory of deliberate democracy and theconcept “governance”. The empirical study was based on the methodology of double reflexivity and conductedusing such tools as case study, focus-group interview and monitoring of the online platforms of Russian andforeign crowdsourcing resources. The authors emphasize and characterize the main technologies of politicalcrowdsourcing: prediction market crowdsourcing, network brainstorming, project crowdsourcing, andcrowdfunding. The authors think that the socio-political role of crowdsourcing lies in the extension of space inwhich the authorities and citizens interact, the initiation and introduction of political innovations, and thedevelopment of the new forms of civil and political participation.

Crowd-Sourcing Corruption: What Petrified Forests, Street Music, Bath Towels and the Taxman Can Tell Us About the Prospects for Its Future

This article seeks to map out the prospects of crowd-sourcing technologies in the area of corruption-reporting. A flurry of initiative and concomitant media hype in this area has led to exuberant hopes that the end of impunity is not such a distant possibility any more - at least not for the most blatant, ubiquitous and visible forms of administrative corruption, such as bribes and extortion payments that on average almost a quarter of citizens reported to face year in, year out in their daily lives in so many countries around the world (Transparency International 2013). Only with hindsight will we be able to tell, if these hopes were justified. However, a closer look at an interdisciplinary body of literature on corruption and social mobilisation can help shed some interesting light on these questions and offer a fresh perspective on the potential of social media based crowd-sourcing for better governance and less corruption. So far the potential of crowd-sourcing is mainly approached from a technology-centred perspective. Where challenges are identified, pondered, and worked upon they are primarily technical and managerial in nature, ranging from issues of privacy protection and fighting off hacker attacks to challenges of data management, information validation or fundraising. In contrast, short shrift is being paid to insights from a substantive, multi-disciplinary and growing body of literature on how corruption works, how it can be fought and more generally how observed logics of collective action and social mobilisation interact with technological affordances and condition the success of these efforts. This imbalanced debate is not really surprising as it seems to follow the trajectory of the hype-and-bust cycle that we have seen in the public debate for a variety of other technology applications. From electronic health cards to smart government, to intelligent transport systems, all these and many other highly ambitious initiatives start with technology-centric visions of transformational impact. However, over time - with some hard lessons learnt and large sums spent - they all arrive at a more pragmatic and nuanced view on how social and economic forces shape the implementation of such technologies and require a more shrewd design approach, in order to make it more likely that potential actually translates into impact.At a minimum, a trawl through this literature makes it possible to move beyond some of the most common-sense conjectures and develop a few more granular guesses on the future of crowd-sourcing corruption. At best, this approach may help identify some not so obvious challenges that may arise along the way and ensure that they are considered in the design process of future corruption crowd-sourcing interventions, raising their likelihood of impact and sustainable success.The remainder of this essay is structured as follows: Section 1 introduces the concept of crowd-sourcing for good governance. It provides a very brief overview of some related initiatives in this area, alongside some of the challenges and reservations that are commonly raised in the debate. Section 2 casts the net a bit wider. It looks for interesting insight and cues in the broader social science literature on social mobilisation and corruption. Based on this, it seeks to gain a better understanding of what other more fundamental challenges may lay ahead for crowd-reporting corruption. Section 3 picks up on these anticipated challenges and presents some ideas on how to address them, both in the design, as well as in the implementation of future crowd-reporting systems, drawing both on emerging insights from impact assessments of conventional social accountability mechanisms as well as lessons learnt within Transparency International’s own global network of anti-corruption NGOs, some of which already run crowd-reporting platforms.

Sick Weather Ahead: On Data-Mining, Crowd-Sourcing and White Noise

The main concern of this article is with the ways in which technologies of data-mining and crowd-sourcing have made it possible for citizens to contribute to the expansion of infectious disease surveillance as both a concrete practice and a compelling fantasy. But I am less interested in participation as such, and more concerned with the epistemological effects that this technological mediation might have for the possibility of epidemic events to become shared objects of knowledge. What happens with epidemic events when they become targets of data-mining and crowd-sourcing technologies?